The Biodiversity Heritage Library has released an Acknowledgment of Harmful Content to recognize deep prejudices within some of the pages of its collection. As a digital library of natural science publications and archival materials, BHL is a free and open access online resource that primarily reflects the print collections of its contributors. Some of the content in BHL is harmful because it reflects ableist, classist, colonialist, eurocentrist, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and other biased views, especially in descriptions of peoples, lands, and species. The long and, at times, painful history of the scientific record has privileged hegemonic perspectives with the right to print while stifling the voices of the powerless.

Acknowledgment of Harmful Content

The Biodiversity Heritage Library acknowledges the existence of harmful content in many biodiversity science publications and original materials included in its collection. We are reckoning with the, at times, painful heritage of our collection and seeking to address its impact on science and culture today. As a curated digital collection aggregating content from hundreds of providers into a single platform, BHL is a reflection of the historical collection development decisions of those providers as well as the publishing practices and historical colonial processes that have shaped the scholarly record of biodiversity science. Scientific understanding evolves over time, through critical analysis of new information and scrutiny of its mistakes. We recognize that as a free and open access digital library, we simultaneously increase and promote access to materials, some of which espouse deep prejudices that are counterproductive to the advancement of scientific knowledge and overshadow the contributions of marginalized peoples across the globe. At best these views are outdated; at worst, the legacy of natural sciences is unjust and inhumane. The harmful content in BHL’s collection goes against the values of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is provided for access as part of the historical record.

BHL joins recent global outcries against racial and environmental injustice. We are assessing our role as a digital library and the responsibility we have to question our neutrality and address harm without reducing access. We are deeply concerned about the continuing crisis of global species loss and the inequitable divisions within our own species. Reflecting on ourselves, we see an organization grappling with inclusion and the acute consequences that these harmful views have on the world and its people today.

Heritage institutions such as the AfricaMuseum, Digital Public Library of America, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Trove, and others are also addressing these issues. In general the museum and cultural heritage community is reckoning with our organizations’ past and present, as well as the ways in which our collections, publications, public exhibitions and strategic goals impact society.

Over the course of 2020, BHL rethought the implementation of our strategic plan with the goal to challenge ourselves towards more equitable collection management, technical development, outreach, partnership development, and mission enabling practices. With regard to our collection management objectives going forward, we will be:

• publishing a collaborative research bibliography to inform new collection management strategies that focus on global challenges including biodiversity loss, systematic racism, and the effects of a worldwide pandemic on scholarly research,
• identifying and filling gaps in the collection to achieve more complete and inclusive representation of the available knowledge of and perspectives on biodiversity, e.g. including indigenous knowledge,
• and conducting a comprehensive review and revision of our collection development policy.

If “knowing the past is critical to reforming the present” as Dr. David Silverman suggests [1] then publicly acknowledging the biases in our collection is a first step towards making our collection more inclusive. As a global consortium with a variety of social, cultural, epistemological, and political factors at play, we are unified in our commitment to advancing equity in the global biodiversity community while also maintaining access to the historical record.

Sincere thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Collections Committee for participating in many challenging discussions and writing BHL’s Acknowledgment. In addition, we would like to thank BHL’s Executive Committee, Secretariat, as well as BHL Staff and Partners for their careful consideration and feedback. The Acknowledgment would not have been possible without the thoughtful input of our reviewers including: Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Diversity Equity Accessibility and Inclusion (DEAI) Committee, as well as colleagues within our professional networks especially Cornell University Library, MBLWHOI Library and the Woods Hole Diversity Advisory Committee, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

BHL is pleased to announce that it has added its bibliographic records to OCLC’s WorldCat® database, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” You can now find BHL e-books via https://www.worldcat.org/. With thousands of libraries worldwide participating in OCLC, contributing our records to this “global library cooperative” allows us to extend the discoverability and access of BHL e-books through its variety of tools and services [1].

If you have access to OCLC metadata service products, please look for the OCLC symbol “BHLMR” when reviewing holdings.

If you are an OCLC participating library interested in adding BHL records to your own catalog, please feel free!

Some key points to keep in mind when viewing or working with BHL records in WorldCat:

• Current BHL holdings in WorldCat reflect our collection’s bibliographic records as of Fall 2019.
• Not every title you find in BHL will be in WorldCat. Only titles with full text available directly within BHL are being provided to OCLC. We are not providing records for titles indexed in our collection that link out to content available via third-party websites.
  • For example, you will find Crawshay’s The birds of Tierra del Fuego (1907) in WorldCat.org. But you will not find Flora Ibérica as this title is indexed in BHL but held directly within the Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid.
• BHL will load records into WorldCat on a quarterly basis going forward.
• As we curate title records within the BHL collection and make changes on our end, we will work with OCLC to update records on a periodic basis.

We are thankful to the kind folks at OCLC who worked diligently and patiently with us to develop a workflow for exporting and uploading the variety of records aggregated into our digital collection from hundreds of contributors worldwide.

A: 3

Group photo of CBHL, EBHL, and Linnaeus Link Annual Meeting attendees

As in CBHL (host) + EBHL (host) + BHL (attendees) but there’s always room for more…especially if they are like this group of Brilliant Happy Librarians!

Back in June I attended the 50th Annual Meeting of The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) which was also host to the 25th anniversary meeting of the European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Group (EBHL) as well as the 22nd annual meeting of Linnaeus Link partners. The theme of the meeting was “Botanical and Horticultural Libraries in the Modern Era: Training and Vision for the Future” and it encouraged its attendees to “[discuss] how technology has united us and what the future holds in store for us as we enter the new millennium.” The joint meeting was held between the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Presentations centered around new or revamped digitization projects, implementing electronic access to materials as well as initiatives to better integrate library and archival materials into research discovery systems.

The meeting showcased a variety of digital collections that were new to me such as the Linnean Society’s Online Collections of specimens, manuscripts, correspondence, paintings, and books, many of which were collected, annotated, or written by Linneaus himself! The Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library also gave a presentation about the digitization of its special collections and Fiona Ainsworth of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew shared about the latest projects in her library to digitize rare Chinese illustrations and catalog the Miscellaneous Reports collection in their archives. I was particularly excited to learn about upcoming plans to update the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid’s Biblioteca Digital for the future.

There were also fascinating presentations on various research projects that made intensive use of the very collections CBHL and EBHL have represented within their organizations. Maura Flannery‘s talk Plants in the Library: The Johannes Harder Herbarium detailed her study of Harder’s 16th century, multi-volume compendium known as a Herbarium vivum. This rare work on botanical collection from German localities was composed by pressing plant specimens directly into the book and illustrating those parts which would not press well such as bulky seeds or stalks. While Maura had the unique chance to see one of these works in person, the rest of us are fortunate enough to have access to this digital copy thanks to the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek. Inspired by the vasculum left to her by her grandmother, Régine Fabri presented on the history of the botanical collecting object. And Eric Sanderson set the perfect backdrop to the meeting by opening it with a discussion of his work on The Welikia Project to detail New York City’s rich ecological history compared with its present urban environment block by block!

This year CBHL honored the work of Susan Fraser, Director of The LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, with the Charles Robert Long Award of Extraordinary Merit. Knowing Susan for my nearly 10 years with BHL it was no surprise to see her receive this award for her exemplary leadership and dedication to improving the global, digital and scholarly impact of the profession. Congratulations Susan!

Besides the fact that CBHL organization draws on my roots working in the U.S. National Herbarium along with my love of librarianship, a critical purpose of attending this year’s meeting was to network with BHL colleagues from 11 (yes, 11!) of our partner organizations. I had the opportunity to get some face time with colleagues from Botany Libraries/Harvard University, Chicago Botanic Garden, Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, National Agricultural Library, New York Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, as well as our newest Affiliate partners from the Lloyd Library and Museum, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg. Indeed CBHL, EBHL, and BHL share much more in common than just our acronyms.

The CBHL-EBHL-Linnaeus Link Annual Meeting reminded me of the importance of nurturing a community of like-minded professionals around shared values and interests. Through these communal experiences, botany and horticulture librarians and researchers enrich their ability to support and disseminate relevant resources, including best practices and digital collections. Working almost exclusively in the virtual digital library world, I forget that sometimes the quickest way to exchange information is face to face as it is a deeper impression of knowledge understood and more likely remembered, than the ephemeral information received via electronic exchange. It is truly an enjoyable group that I hope to be able to meet again at future annual meetings.

Bianca Crowley on the Annual Meeting field trip to tour the High Line in New York City

Reflecting back on my experience I am left with one nagging thought about the continued ubiquity of library information silos and the difficulty of practically executing linked open information systems. CBHL and EBHL partners shared information about many digitization projects, many of which contain digital books living separately in their own web spaces. I can’t help but wonder if it would be useful to aggregate these materials under a common access point so that researchers and librarians outside the CBHL/EBHL community could more easily discover them. Could BHL help integrate some of these disparate book collections together? If our shared acronyms are any indicator, this may be an idea worth exploring in the form of deeper collaboration for the future.

At the end of October I attended the Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016. This was the 3rd time I’ve attended this meeting since 2009 and was by far the best one yet! The Forum coincided with IA’s 20th anniversary so there was a big push from IA to showcase their latest and greatest to celebrate their platinum year.

Some of the coolest new features highlighted:

• The ability to perform a full text search across all books and journal volumes in IA such as this full text search for “darwin.”
• New keyword search functionality for their Wayback Machine – just look at all these web pages about “biodiversity.”
• Additionally, Wikimedia Foundation is now using the Wayback Machine to fix over 1 million broken links in English Wikipedia! Plus Mozilla is experimenting with the Wayback Machine to develop a pilot that will eliminate the dreaded 404 pages that pop up when Internet links break. How useful!
• See more of their newest cool innovations

New GifCities searchable gif database

New Webverse 3D web visualization tool

The most successful aspect of the Forum was meeting with Internet Archive colleagues and partners face to face, many of which share similar digitization workflow and collection management challenges to BHL. In particular, colleagues from the Getty Research Institute, Georgetown University Law Library and HathiTrust are pursuing projects that could help inform BHL collection development for the future.

IA Founder Brewster Kahle delivers presentation

Interestingly, as the meeting attendees imagined the future of libraries over the next 10-20 years, I was pleased to hear that some of the challenges shared by both HathiTrust and IA are issues BHL has already considered and continues to explore as its collection and consortium grows:

• In what ways can we expand the scope of our content? Should we?
• What are the best strategies to ensure comprehensiveness of your collection?
• How can we encourage greater curation of our collection?
• What emphasis should be placed on the development of tools for de-duplication?

In case you missed our last post recapping the in-copyright content in BHL over 2015, we secured agreements with 23 licensors to provide 34 in-copyright titles for free and open access via our online collection.

BHL is thrilled that for the first few months of 2016, we have gotten permission to add 20 new in-copyright titles! Why such a sudden bounty? We have the work of the new IMLS-Funded Project: Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) to thank for securing the large majority of these agreements and for performing the work of integrating this new content into our collection. Some of the titles below are from small natural history organizations that had previously digitized their content but lacked a way to have it represented in BHL. In the coming months, as larger content providers benefit from EABL assistance, the list will grow to include unique titles never before digitized.Our latests in-copyright titles are:

1. Arachnologische Mitteilungen from the Arachnologische Gesellschaft
2. Sage Notes from the Idaho Native Plant Society
3. Roosevelt Wild Life Station:
   1. Roosevelt Wild Life Annals
   2. Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin
4. Long Island Botanical Society Newsletter from the Long Island Botanical Society
5. California Native Plant Society:
   1. The Bay Leaf from the East Bay Chapter
   2. Mimulus Memo from the Kern Chapter
   3. The Pipevine from the Mount Lassen Chapter
6. “A short Flora of Berwickshire” by M E Braithwaite (2014)
7. Golden Gate Audubon Society’s The Gull
8. Quaestiones Entomologicae of the University of Alberta
9. The Echinoderm Newsletter from the Smithsonian Institution
10. Wisconsin Entomological Society
    1. Wisconsin Entomological Society Newsletter
    2. “Checklist of Wisconsin Dragonflies” (1993)
    3. “Wisconsin Millipeds” (1995)
    4. “Checklist of Wisconsin Centipedes (Chilopoda)” (1997)
    5. “Checklist of Wisconsin Butterflies” (2002)

Linnaean Society of New York

1. Transactions of the Linnaean Society of New York
2. Abstract of the proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York
3. Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York

As a reminder, our in-copyright titles are availble under a Creative Commons license as specified in the volume metadata. Would you like to learn more about reusing CC licensed content? Please see our Licensing & Copyright page as linked from the footer of our website: